Do Conversational Agents Need Explicit Memory? A Controlled Comparison with Raw-History Retrieval
Explicit memory systems transform conversation history into persistent representations intended to improve future access, often at substantial construction cost. Yet it remains unclear whether this added complexity yields better answer accuracy than retrieving directly from raw history. This study compares six state-of-the-art explicit memory systems with raw-history RAG on LongMemEval-S and BEAM-100K under original and controlled retrieval settings. We find only localized gains for particular question types and tight run-time context budgets, with no consistent advantage over strong raw-history RAG baselines. Oracle retrieval shows that some systems fail to preserve answer-supporting inf...
| Authors | Yongjie Zhou, Shuai Wang, Bevan Koopman et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 17 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 October 2026 |
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